Every Sunday we dance in the liturgy at St. Paul’s Chapel – a simple and ancient Greek/Roman step that takes us up to the altar for communion.  The congregation – largely made up of first-time visitors - sometimes unexpectedly breaks into applause upon reaching the altar, a spontaneous expression of joy for having done something so connected and unexpected and strangely appropriate in church. 

This past week we took that up a notch. Last Sunday night St. Paul’s was packed with 300 exuberant people, with their hands in the air, dancing for joy.

A posse of young dancers from Brooklyn have been making a film this past year called Girl Walk//All Day that has been released in 6-minute chapters on the Gothamist website.  It has just been assembled as a whole and they head out on tour next week. There are no words, only a soundtrack provided by the group Girl Talk, and the storyline follows these dancers as they dance through the streets, shops, parks (and even Yankee Stadium) of New York City, inviting people to dance with them, simply for the joy of being alive. 

The pleasure and poignancy of the film arises both in the exuberance of the street dancing, and in how passersby interact, or don't.  A few people dare to smile at the dancers, and a couple even dare to shuffle their feet with them.  But given that this is New York, most people look straight through the spectacle as if it didn’t exist, or look away, or hunker down on their sandwich or newspaper, or step away warily from the dancers, as if they were contagious (as in fact they are).  The film is a wonderful piece of popular artistry that is going viral around the world.  It’s pure joy.

My colleague Emily had the brilliant idea to invite this joy to church – to open with an hour of instructed dance (think amped up line-dancing), then a screening of the film, followed by a social hour.  The producer and dancers eagerly accepted, and the dream became real. 

About 200 folks turned up for the class – Nearly all had never been to St. Paul’s before – most probably had not been to church since childhood if at all. 

John, one of the main characters in the film (“The Creep”), taught some wonderful freestyle moves. The heart of his teaching was easy participation and unedited joy, the soul’s language spoken through the body. 

The film gathered even more people into the room, about 300, many of whom just kept dancing along with the story on the screen.  The air was electric with a kind of childlike freedom.   Even though I was nursing a cold, I found my feet moving irresistibly. There's something about watching Joy happen around you that inspires more of it - and conversely, as the film’s footage showed, that grim determination to be somber and focused and even unhappy has a tremendous grip when it is adopted by the masses. 

In the social time that unfolded afterwards, folks were effusively thankful, and a little baffled.  Every interaction I had with this young crowd were versions of: “How did you get permission to do this?” “I never thought churches could be places where this sort of thing could happen.” “If I told my parents I was dancing in church they would never believe me – both that I had gone to church, and that I could dance there.”  “This sure isn’t what I grew up with.”  “What are you going to do next?”  One young reporter from Columbia asked me: “How long have you been doing things like this here?” “Oh, about 300 years,” I answered. 

Of course it was a quip in the moment, but I think it’s true.  I look over in the corner at George Washington’s pew and at the original painting of the Great Seal of the United States hanging above it, and I think there is probably something in this place’s DNA that says “I don’t know; let’s try it!” – a daring that is willing to explore new paths to let something passionate out of the box.  Trinity might have a venerable reputation, but that ballast allows for creativity and risk

I’ve seen archival photos from the 70’s: a stage set up in front of Trinity Church with the Broadway cast of Godspell, and Wall Street packed as far as the eye could see: 

Want more images of music and the arts in the late 1960s? Click here.

It’s not just the DNA of Trinity; it’s somewhere in the blood of every church – just read the Book of Acts.  One new risky experiment after the next, based on the idea that God was doing something new in the world, fueled by individual hearts on fire, collected into community.

 What is next for St. Paul’s and Trinity on this score?  I don’t know. That’s part of the fun of it; it’s like the film’s dance – apparently freestyle but based on deep, ancient,  and durable patterns - and powered by joy.  Whatever it is, I know we will discover it organically, and collectively, and that the spark will probably come from an unexpected corner, and that someone will probably say, “I don’t know; let’s try it and see!” 

For a gallery of photos from the event click here. 

To see the film Girl Walk//All Day, click here. 
(note: soundtrack contains profanity)

The MLK holiday has been around long enough that for many of us it may pass without reflection, like Memorial Day or Labor Day. I was expecting another holiday weekend like that: we would have a special preacher in church, sing We Shall Overcome, and sleep in on Monday.

So I decided to step in a little deeper this year, and I watched a documentary last night: Soundtrack for a Revolution. It had a transformative effect on how I am remembering this anniversary, which might make it for me the most important national holiday I celebrate this year.

The documentary looked at the whole arc of Martin’s vocation as a movement leader not from the top but from the bottom: from the perspective of the grassroots music that brought people together, and its power to unite them in participative community - literally in one voice.

When Martin and the early movement leaders embraced Gandhi’s principles of non-violence, music immediately took a key role - slave songs, spirituals, Methodist hymns, made-up words to popular ditties - all these came together to forge something indestructible. One after another, a theme was articulated in various ways: “They could take our lives, but they couldn’t take our song. Once we discovered that, we discovered our freedom.”

Steven Mithin in his book The Singing Neanderthals: the Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body suggests that early humans very likely sang before we spoke. Song is that deep in us. In an iPod generation we have largely lost that skill and awareness. I’d like to think that it doesn’t require an extreme crisis to bring that awareness back; maybe it could be enough to reflect on this striking and important liberating moment in our recent past, and pay attention to the deep hunger for community that so many people are currently starving for.

Very dear to my heart is a project I have worked on with for the past six years with a group of musicians and religious leaders. It’s called Music that Makes Community, a grassroots workshop-based approach to helping people rediscover their collective voice in song, and the power of that discovery to transform other parts of their communal life. I have seen over and over again how that simple practice of making music together with nothing or little more than the human voice creates an immediate soulfulness that seems almost magic, though it is our birthright.

“Mic check… Mic check…” is the now familiar opening call of the OWS protesters/organizers who use an interesting and effective style of message repetition to create a collective focus in a crowd: the leader does not rely on a speaker system, but instead shouts his message to the crowd, and those who can hear repeat it back phrase by phrase. A much larger crowd gets informed, and every repeater gets a double reinforcement of the message. Maybe this is a new generation’s early discovery of what the civil rights protesters learned so well: Common purpose, common voice, and common song is unstoppable.

There is much more for us all to discover and remember about collective soul and collective action. As someone who goes to church every Sunday where we sing our way through the whole service, I know we have a good laboratory to work on it! Keep singing!

To learn more about the Soundtrack for a Revolution documentary go to soundtrackforarevolutionfilm.com

To learn more about Music that Makes Community project visit allsaintscompany.org

And to hear a great MLK day sermon preached at Trinity yesterday visit www.trinitywallstreet.org/webcasts/videos/sermons/guests/holy-eucharist-11

Since it started, I have felt the pulse of the Occupy Wall Street movement from close proximity. Now at the three-month anniversary, here’s my take on what’s happening on the ground.

The early days of any movement are first vivid and then obscure. The first couple of months here were a euphoric blend of high energy and creative output for many. This past month, post-Zucotti Park, has been one of re-visioning, with the young movement trying on different voices and different plans of action as it seeks to move forward.

Some of the principal organizers have focused the substantial money they are raising on rented indoor office space to advance the movement. Many of those who had been attracted by the camp’s utopian promise took what they had gained back home with them, to let their self-transformation catalyze others. And one wing of the protest has begun speaking of the occupation of private property as an act of prophetic liberation, including a square of private land owned by Trinity, a mile north of Wall Street.

Trinity got engaged in pastoral and material support of the movement from the start, and our involvement was not just as an unaffected donor: surprising to many, the Trinity congregation is not comprised of financial types, but rather is a socially and racially diverse group struggling through economic hard times, job loss, layoff, etc. Along with many of the OWS participants, we are wrestling with, what “movement” really means - how to move a vision forward - around obstacles, with incredible divergence of opinion and agendas, and without a clear action plan yet formed. It’s pretty gritty and non-utopian, but it feels truthful and real.

I have been so grateful to have witnessed the painful and heroic struggle of the OWS General Assembly’s spokes-council and other sub-groups (which continue to meet in our parish hall) as they try to forge an alternative way of being community and making decisions together. And I am weekly blown away by the stories coming out of Charlotte’s Place, our neighborhood community center. Since the first days of OWS, it has been a hive of activity, serving up to 1,000 guests per week. Since the clearing of Zuccotti Park the balance has shifted toward caring for those who were drawn to the movement but have felt left behind, many without work or any place of belonging. The stories of personal triumph, struggle, and grace are mostly private but very poignant, and I feel like I’m often seeing the Light breaking through unexpectedly in hidden, daily ways.

In the coming weeks we’ll be convening a series of forums with noted teachers and activists on many of the issues raised by the OWS movement, as a way to increase understanding. We are redoubling our support of job-creation initiatives in the city, trying to create a model that can be replicated by others. And of course, Charlotte’s Place continues to be open to all.

To that end, an on-the-ground practical pitch: The gospel invitation to people who were wondering what Jesus was really up to was: “Come and See.” That’s the best way to discover more about what is happening at Trinity during these extraordinary days. If you’re within reach, consider coming in to help; if you’re far away, pray for us and for all who are finding their way here.

Movement is a hopeful word for me; it signifies energy, growth, and change. Our preaching theme this Advent is “Light Breaks” - it breaks into a broken world, and it’s definitely broken into our lives here, through all the points of view and all the disturbance of these last three chaotic months of civil activism on Wall Street. I am hopeful that the OWS Movement will continue to move, to grow into its deepest prophetic message of inclusion, where all of us embrace our responsibly to create the world we share together. 

Want to join the conversation? Visit Trinity Wall Street at http://www.facebook.com/TrinityWallSt

The Episcopal / Anglican Church has always been a big tent. Going back to the 16th century, we have a long history of bridging wide divides - Catholic and Protestant, rulers and working class, and in more modern times gay and straight, African theological context and North American theological context, inter-religious dialog. We are great conversationalists. At the heart of that big tent approach is a theology of prayer. If the people pray honestly together, they can live together. So we convene people together, in conversation and in prayer.

As anyone who has tried to enter conversation between conflicted parties knows: it is a lot harder to stay in conversation than it is to square off and take sides. Taking sides gives us the satisfaction of being right, but entering a conversation gives us only a guarantee that we will be changed if we are really open, which is scary and threatening and usually painful; no wonder so few people do it. Conversation is at the heart of Conversion.

The OWS Protests breaking out across the planet are symptoms -- they point to something toxic in the system that needs rebalancing. A good doctor is always thinking of the Whole, and always thinking beyond the symptom.

Living locally to OWS, I have the great privilege of seeing these little moments within the symptoms of a drive toward wholeness, of conversation and of conversion happening in the cracks of all the craziness: Our neighborhood center, Charlotte’s Place, because of its proximity and open door policy, has become a de facto rest stop for the protest organizers; a place to check email, to use the facilities, to tell their story to someone who will listen, to plan and organize. This last week one of our team noticed a couple police officers at one of the tables, not policing but resting, filling out reports while around them kids checked their email and talked about political theory. When one of the protest organizers heard of their presence he said “Yes! Sweet. - this is what we need more of.”

At the Sunday Eucharist this past week, I came down the line with Communion and handed it to a couple officers standing there with tears in their eyes. Several more down the row I encountered one of the protest organizers. Her eyes were wet as well. And then mine were too.

Last week I talked with a consultant friend of mine who advises the largest financial groups in the nation. He recounted that the CEO of one of them, when grilled by his board about the protest, said flatly, “Listen, they have a point. We’d better pay attention.” It takes a generous and courageous heart to risk that kind of conversation, on every side. It is the hardest work, and the best. And it is the only thing that in the end can convert us, which is something that we all need.

Yesterday I talked with my favorite OWS protester, who carries a colorful sign listing the Fruits of the Spirit the Apostle Paul lists in Galations. He said that the size of the tent is a big topic even in Zucotti Park. As homeless people arrive and try to find a place in the group, there is a widening divide between those who think that the homeless are “undeserving” of the supply of donated raingear and mittens, and those who think that if the movement can’t live out its values in the park itself, then how do they advocate with authenticity the need to build a better society? The protesters are expanding how they think about the 99 and one percent.

Pulling in the one percent, whether at the top or the bottom, is the hard work. Being in the midst of how that happens, spiritually, soulfully, corporeally, is exhausting and exhilarating work. Ultimately it’s the Spirit’s work, who is bringing a lively thing into being through this very messy and very important conversation.

Want to join the conversation? Visit Trinity Wall Street athttp://www.facebook.com/TrinityWallSt

The Occupy Wall Street protest has just rolled through its one-month anniversary, and this past week at Trinity Church’s neighborhood center, Charlotte’s Place, Trinity convened a panel of Zucotti Park’s resident organizers. They were self-described "punk kids" who offered a fascinating view into the month-old collective mind of the park-dwelling community.

The first thing I noticed was that the speakers weren’t referring to a protest, they were referring to a movement. And when asked point blank what they wanted to see happen because of what they were doing in the park, their answers were as diffuse and universal as communitarians from the 1960s: Peace. Harmony. Justice. Courageous Community Values.

But from the outset they used another word that intrigued me: Responsibility: They said they were trying to be responsive to what’s happening in the world, that they recognize that a powerful surge is taking place. They feel responsible to give voice to that.

As nebulous as that might sound at first, they spoke about it not as theory, but as practice. The organizers become most animated when they talked about what they were discovering about the daily building of a working community: how decisions were made, how to feed and clean up after hundreds of residents, how they were learning to deal with cranky, mean signs and their creators in the midst of a diligently uncensored community. Their makeshift village is impressive: the kitchen filters its gray water through charcoal, the lending library is better than many in small towns, and the daily General Assembly works on a 9/10th voting consensus.

They acknowledged that this was incredibly hard work, but they see their makeshift village, and all the others around the world that are springing up, as incubators in real time of civic awareness and duty. They were as excited about living inside the culture they were creating as they were about its effect on the wider world. 

Their theme was consistently about moving from a sense of isolation and powerlessness to one of agency and connection to deepest purpose. They want to make a space where anyone with a sign and a message to share can feel that their voice matters and can be heard.

They talked about how their investment in the real-time on-the-ground lives of others and in the civic discourse has changed them forever, has made them feel part of something in a real, direct, and breathing way. One protestor put it bluntly: “I was watching this on the TV, and decided to turn it off and come down here to the park, and I discovered it’s a lot more fun to create something together. If they shut down this movement tomorrow it would have already changed my life.”

A protest can only happen because a deeper set of values are surfacing that run counter to some toxic prevailing norm, and this deeper Yes! seems to be taking shape slowly. Near the end of the forum, one member of the panel blurted out: “Really, this is not about occupying Wall Street; It’s about occupying everything!” He explained how the movement to him is about showing up for your life rather than abdicating, about being an agent instead of a victim, about getting involved rather than waiting for a “them” to take care of it.

Occupy Everything might be the best synthesis I’ve heard yet of the possibility that is germinating in the compost of this gathering. It should not be surprising that the protest signs talk about everything under the sun, because this greater Yes undergirds them all. At the end of the day the signs all seem to say the same thing; I am a subject, not an object to be polled and purchased and traded. I am not a commodity. The 99 percent slogan floating around Wall Street implies that in the end, we can only flourish collectively. It’s not utopian, or right wing, or libertarian to say that the more we take personal and collective responsibility for our civic life, the less “governing” - taming the selfish beast - needs to happen.

Whatever happens on Wall Street in the next month, “Occupy Everything” is my great takeaway of what this now-global wake-up call is, or can be. It’s more like a mantra, said to and for the self, and then lived out into the world one day at a time.

I’m going to start praying it regularly, and see where it takes me.

Want to join the conversation? Visit Trinity Wall Street athttp://www.facebook.com/TrinityWallSt

I live and work a block away from the tent city that has sprung up next door to Wall Street, and so I walk through the middle of their encampment several times a week. At first, I rolled my eyes along with many other passersby: the extreme and raggedly disorganized range of complaint made many say, “What aren’t they protesting!?”

But the longer I have paid attention, the more I have noticed.

The protesters represent one end of a larger spectrum, intentionally exposed, and like St. Francis, they are choosing extreme action to make a point. They are the injured knee with torn ligaments that is screaming in unbearable, inarticulate pain. The knee doesn’t know how to fix its tear, but it knows how to draw attention to a problem that affects the whole. They have drawn attention by the means they have.

The striking thing about the larger demonstrations that happen every several days around the hardcore protestors is how Normal the participants appear - there are students and teachers and priests and ironworkers and office workers. They actually have a pretty clear and focused message: There are deep but resolvable cracks in our system of governance, which has artificially rigged the possibility of extreme profit at the expense of the greater good. The most articulate spokesmen identify a single, most pressing need for action: that Congress reinstate HR1489, the GLASS-STEAGALL ACT, set up in 1933 and repealed in 1999, removing conflict of interest safeguards between investment and commercial banks (this doesn’t make for vivid evening news video-clips, so you’ll have to Google/Wikipedia it.)

Standing right next to the craziest demands (abolish all government) are extremely articulate proponents for the rule of law and the rights of citizens, and I have seen the most brilliant community organizing taking place, where a “preacher” is using repeat-after-me call and response to send a memo to thousands gathered, relaying plans to link together the best next ideas of groups gathering in other cities. The protesters’ current purpose as part of a living organism - the screaming knee - seems clear to me: it is to draw attention to a problem many of us are aware of, even deeply affected by, which we are waiting for a “them” to do something about. In part, they are calling attention to our own abdication.

One of the taglines most seen and heard on the street is “We are the 99 percent.” It has an unintended double-entendre. It points to the supermajority who are suffering the systemic manipulation by ruthless profiteers, but it also points to the fact that we are all complicit in creating (and resolving) what ails us. And from my perspective it doesn’t go far enough: We are the 100 percent.

I write and preach regularly that in God’s economy there is only an “us,” and whenever we fall back to us-and-them thinking, we are contributing to a powerful but failed system that Jesus came to tip into collapse. Jesus in his Resurrection, steps beyond death and creates a new dimension. There is no retribution for his killers, how could there be? – he has just stepped into larger life where the only message can be: ‘Come on, join in the party.’ Any act of scapegoating - it’s their fault; this one is to blame - feeds the old death-bound beast. Making something new is making something together - receiving something together from a God who gives all.

Pretty as it sounds, it’s never smooth; there is huge upheaval and conflict along the way to larger life; there are huge risks and uncertainties, and there’s always the underbelly of human fear and insecurity that all of us strive to overcome. Jesus is pretty patient, since it’s taking us awhile to get it.

Trinity Church stands at the corner of Broadway and Wall Street, where the country’s formative revolution swirled around its feet and through its doors, and it has spent more than 300 years learning how to be part of the 100 percent. We have built deep relationships with all of lower Manhattan, and our new neighborhood center, Charlotte's Place, is providing pastoral care and respite to our new neighbors while we are discussing how to convene meaningful conversations among people of radically diverging viewpoints.

None of us fully understands what’s going on right now, or where it will go next, but we are confident in our role: listening, convening, listening some more, speaking the challenge of Good News, and keeping our doors wide open in the middle of the whole mess of humanity. This is not a wishy-washy stance. We speak, listen, challenge, convene, and converse with the 100 percent as an anchor, not as a compromise or for lack of conviction.

That is an often-uncomfortable place to stand, but it’s very solid.

This past Sunday Trinity’s rector, Jim Cooper, performed the blessing of a civil marriage in the context of the Sunday liturgy at St. Paul’s Chapel for two of our parishioners there.

It was an extraordinary and moving liturgy for the whole community gathered: a Sunday liturgy that included the blessing of a marriage, rather than a wedding that happened to be on a Sunday. It felt to me in a more literal way than ever that Marriage is for everyone. Like a baptism, marriage strengthens the whole community as well as claims a blessing that we see God speaking in our midst.

It’s for others to talk about what that Sunday meant to them, but I have just been asked by a group creating a teaching series on marriage equality in the church to write a reflection on my own marriage in church on a Sunday three years ago, so here is my experiential take on why blessing marriage in the context of the church’s regular worship is so personally powerful:

Our marriage took place at San Francisco City Hall in August 2008, during the five months that it was legal in California, and it was blessed in the Sunday liturgy that following Sunday. We intentionally separated the civil wedding and the blessing of our marriage, since we have long considered the church to be best at blessing and less authentic to its calling when it acts as an agent of the state.

Our marriage at City Hall included only our best men and our good friend Sara Miles who we deputized to officiate. We chose that kind of privacy to be able to better attend to the meaning of the moment. We also had an affinity for City Hall in San Francisco, which had become a prophetic platform and a temple of sorts in the ongoing struggle for marriage equality.

But that was only one half of the ceremony; the other half was the blessing that Sunday at St. Gregory’s, and that blessing was multiplied by the presence of the community, fully gathered. We intentionally told Paul, the rector, that we didn’t want to participate in the construction of this service - we wanted simply to show up, the way a baby would show up to a baptism. In the same way that baptism in liturgy calls everyone present to their core vocation, we wanted that attention focused on us to do the same: focus the community on what God was doing for all of us, all the time.

So Paul went to work crafting a blessing rite that fit into the context of the principal Sunday morning liturgy. What he produced we still recite to one another - the vows he wrote drew from scripture and the tradition:

Javier/Daniel, have taken you to be my spouse. All that I have I offer you; what you have to give I gladly receive; wherever you go, I will go. You are my love. God keep me true to you always and you to me.

What I remember most vividly from that morning three years ago was the enfolding way that the community surrounded us. As the assembly gathered around the altar to pray the Eucharistic prayer, they came around us and laid their hands on our shoulders, and on the shoulders of those who could reach, and prayed:

All praise and blessing to you, God of love, creator of the universe, maker of humankind in your likeness, source and blessing of love. All praise to you for you have created courtship and marriage, joy and gladness, feasting and laughter, pleasure and delight, lover and beloved. May your blessing come in full upon Daniel and Javier. Let their love for each other be a seal upon their hearts, a mantle about their shoulders and a crown on their foreheads. May they know your presence in their joys and in their sorrows. May they reach old age in the company of friends, and come at last to your eternal kingdom.

As other cultures more connected than ours know, It takes a village to raise a child, and it takes a community to bless a marriage. Not that we ever felt that our love for one another was not blessed by God - indeed, it’s been the greatest blessing of both our lives - but the weight of loving hands on our shoulders; the voice of the community in our ears; the hugs, hugs, and more hugs, was a language that our bodies and souls understood and absorbed in the deepest of ways. It is still as vivid for both of us as the day it happened.

I think our blessing that day at St. Gregory’s spoke to the core of what the church has to say through the sacrament of marriage (something that the church has largely lost through its practice of isolating weddings to Saturdays, making them appear like mini-coronations, and unduly focusing on “bride of Christ” imagery at the expense of older covenant imagery). The focus was less on the vows we made than on paying attention to the vow God makes, and on what God is doing among us: God gave us each other to love and to cherish, for life. God gives all of us one another to make each other whole, and to fill out the body of Christ, which offers itself to the world.

That’s the meaning of marriage. It’s between two people, but it’s for everyone.

Now the daily build to 9/11 is palpable. It's not just numbers; it's energy. It's thick and getting thicker. The downtown is dense with energy on a normal day with Wall Street workers, the heavy international tourism load, and the thousand construction workers building the towers, tunnels, and plazas. Now add to that the arriving pilgrims. I call them pilgrims not because I know the intention of their hearts but simply because they have come for this specific destination. That's at very least what a pilgrim is. There are a couple dozen right now standing in front of the firemen's memorial next to Ground Zero. There are several hundred more in St. Pauls Chapel, all having a variation of every pilgrim's experience.

For all these pilgrims, before this moment, the project was about getting here. Now that they are here, in this moment, the project is about making meaning of the experience. After they snap their photographs that slight sense of lostness appears on their faces that is so common to pilgrims everywhere. I saw it most strongly in Santiago de Compostela in Spain at the end of a 300-mile walking pilgrimage. The pilgrims arrive on the plaza in front of the cathedral and their walk is over. Now what? Then it sinks in: the next step is part of the journey, maybe the most important part.

On Tuesday Krista Tippett broadcast her NPR show On Being from St. Pauls Chapel, and she titled it "Remembering Forward." How do we remember who we are called to become? Her program will air in the context of Trinity's theme for this week: "Remember to Love." We have been reflecting in sermons and music on how our contemplation of our past calls out of us something more that regret, revenge, or empty loss. Remembering to love actually takes us to a new place: unlike physical healing, spiritual healing is about far more than returning to normal; it is discovering a new norm far greater than the old one. Its growth and evolution.

Three years ago, when I first arrived in New York, I saw a jacket emblazoned with the slogan. "I didn't forget; I don't forgive." That's one way of remembering - it's a powerful one that fuels many people's lives, but it's not one that will make more of us in the end. Forgiveness is precisely about NOT forgetting, about remembering in a new way, one that takes the toxicity out of the memory. Remember(ing in a way that allows us) to Love. This is the most important pilgrimage of all: the pilgrimage of the heart and the transformation of our world. If we lose sight of that destination we are done for.

I hope that at least some of those who come to this little place that has the whole world's focus this weekend will let their disorientation sink in, and let the "What's Next?" pilgrim question do it's holy work. September 12 will be an important date for all of us: HOW we return home or return to normal makes all the difference, whether we return to our lives as tourists back from vacation or as dazed pilgrims pulled into a larger story, discovering a greater path and a higher calling.

Either path is a choice that is open to us at every moment.

At about 9am yesterday morning the eye of the hurricane suddenly appeared above lower Manhattan. The sky brightened, the rain stopped, the wind died down, and I ventured out. The downtown was empty and quiet, and this calm in the middle of the storm was as surreal as the calm before it - there was a predictable second-half coming, and yet the brightness of this one hour of relative quiet made that predictability itself seemed imaginary and strange.

I walked over to the church to check in with the guards and engineers who had stayed on site to watch over this durable but delicate old building. Everything had held together so far. I walked to the front of the church (where, to keep the surreality theme going, a tour bus was unloading a small group of Chinese tourists - right into the eye!) and down Wall Street toward the East River. It seemed that everyone who stayed behind had the same idea, and a little gathering of a couple dozen people, plus dogs and TV cameras, had gathered on the steps going down to the water, quarterbacking the event so far - what didn’t happen, what could have happened, what might happen next time. A reporter and camera crew comically scurried around trying to find a bit of standing water so they could paint the picture in as dire colors as possible, but for most residents the fear was gone, even if there was more rain to come. Then, like a train arriving on time, the wind reversed direction and the rains picked up again, and we watched from the window as Irene spent herself and passed northward.

When the program staff checked in with each other at the end of the day as we have been doing throughout the weekend the idea hatched: we may have missed church, but ‘wherever two or three are gathered…‘ Why not end the day with a Eucharist, with whomever we could collect from the neighborhood? So our deacon Bob and his wife Dana, Fr. Mark, and Javier and myself set chairs in a circle at the foot of the altar and read the readings of the day, reflected, prayed, and shared the meal of bread and wine around the Trinity altar.

We commented on how poignant it was to be in this calm, quiet space together on a Sunday, with an sense of how “full” it felt from all the layers of prayer laid down for generations before us, and “seeing” all the faces of those who gather each Sunday sitting there in their favorite pews though the building was empty. It was a sweet moment of awareness in an un-anxious post-storm calm. We were standing together, standing with more people than we could know, in a church that, thank God, still stands whole.

It was a surreal feeling to be walking along the Hudson River park today (Friday) in 80-degree August sun, surrounded by strollers, sunbathers, skateboarders - knowing that the mayor had just ordered a mandatory evacuation of the neighborhood in advance of Hurricane Irene. Planning for impending disaster when the sky is clear is hard to reconcile. The planning seems almost make-believe.

Planning for cataclysm is not always, or usually, possible - like the east-coast earthquake this past week. It came on another sunny day, out of the blue as they always do. I was riding in the elevator so I never felt it, but when I got to my floor everyone was buzzing: What was that? And soon we saw office buildings on Wall Street start to self-evacuate.

Coming from San Francisco I was at first puzzled by their response. If the quake has already happened the reason to evacuate has passed. But someone in the office explained it to me differently: “I have never experienced an earthquake,” he said. “But I have experienced a terrorist attack.” He and many other downtowners who have worked here for over a decade assumed a bomb as they streamed down the stairwells. Even once their brains knew it was an earthquake, their bodies were responding as if it were an attack. Two weeks away from the 10th anniversary of 9/11, it was clear how close to the surface that wound of memory still is for those who lived through it.

Now as buildings start to be evacuated and storefronts are boarded up it feels as if those 10-year-old memories, the shocks earlier this week, and fears of a rising tide are fusing into one for some people. And still the August sun shines, leading other folks in conversations I’m overhearing to look into the bright blue sky and shrug it all off. Standing somewhere in the middle here (and technically half a block into Emergency Zone A), Javier and I have decided to stick out the storm. I like the idea of staying near Trinity. As it did at 9/11, it may become a victim in the days ahead, but as it did ten years ago, it will also become a place of healing and recovery as soon as possible.

I’ve spent the better part of two days helping to plan and prepare Trinity for whatever is ahead. Now that planning gives way to prayer, as the weather starts to change, and we wait. It’s been a gift to this city these past two days to have the advance preparation to batten down the hatches; now it will be an equal gift for everyone who remains to have that in-the-moment responsiveness of a good pilot on deck, leaning into the storm.